Sunday, January 22, 2023

Constant Reader Book of the Month January 2023: Making Pretty by Corey Ann Haydu

 

They f--- you up your mom and dad;

They may not mean to but they do.

Philip Larkin

 

I will tell you up front the review I am about to write is not the one I planned to. When I finished reading Making Pretty, I was planning to write a review about a dark insight into a family so dysfunctional that you truly wonder how anybody in their circle will make it out intact, and gives you little hope the narrator will. It would have been a challenging review, but I like challenging myself and I particularly like the idea of writing myself out of corners. Now, however, having some time to think about it, I realize that there are at least two interpretations of the story in this novel, neither mutually exclusive, and both subject to the interpretation of the reader.

Looked at one way, Making Pretty is the story of Arizona Warren, the daughter of a plastic surgeon whose love life is so messy and dysfunctional, it has warped any hope his children have of any kind of normal relationship, that the affair she has with a fellow student over one summer shows just how utterly damaged she is by living with her father as to what love looks like, that this is being done in parallel to her father’s latest affair, engagement and marriage, and that it ends with her and her sister running away but with no hope that answers are at the end or at all.

Looked at another way, Making Pretty is the story of one of the most ridiculously dysfunctional families you’ll ever meet, who have gotten to the point where the sisters make bets about how long their father latest marriage will last and what stuff the wife will leave behind when her father inevitably gets tired of her, that the romance Arizona has seems so utterly serious and end-all as much as that’s how so many relationships seem to teenagers everywhere, and that the end journey is basically one where maybe she has learned something at the end of this. We all know the phrase about history repeating, first as tragedy, then as farce, and at this point, Sean Varren’s relationships have repeated so many times that they’ve gone well past farce and into flat-out parody.  At one point near the end, Arizona comments that her father must have his divorce attorney on speed-dial and by this point in the book, we can imagine said attorney picking up  the phone begging his client to consider celibacy for a while.

Either version makes it very clear that Sean Varren is absolutely unqualified to be a father of any sort. Sean is a New York plastic surgeon, who is taken the phrase that so many say: “Tell me what you don’t like about yourself” and by now altered it too: “Let me tell you what I don’t like about yourself.”  Arizona mentions that her father is endlessly doodling on pictures of women, looking for ways he can improve them. “I can’t turn it off,” he says with a shrug.  We don’t know if his wives have met him because of who he is or because they want some kind of procedures, but Arizona is very clear that all of the women in his life have had them at some point. She judges them by saying that even after they end, they never have any of their work undone.

The warning lights are flashing by the time we learn this, but in the middle of the book Arizona’s sister Montana reveals a secret about her father so appalling that it sickens her sister to the point that she wishes she never learned it. (You’ll wish you hadn’t either, but I won’t tell you.) The thing is, this shouldn’t come as a shock to the reader when we learn it and not to Arizona. Nearly a hundred pages earlier, she reveals that for her thirteenth birthday her father and his newest wife Natasha gave her a gift certificate for any procedure she wanted done to herself when she turned eighteen.  Arizona doesn’t know what she finds most horrible: that her father actually gave her this gift or that he couldn’t understand why she was so upset when she burst into tears afterwards.  When she meets her older sister Montana, who has just come back for her freshman year at college, she is appalled by many things, not the least of which is her sister has cashed that gift certificate in.  You get the feeling that for Montana, this was a cry for her father to finally pay attention to her, even though by now she knows it will never work.

Arizona is very clearly warped so badly by her father’s lifestyle that she has no true idea of what love is or what any of the women in her father’s life truly meant to her.  By this point, with the exception of Natasha, one of the more recent ones, she has cut all of them out of her life. Even then, she doesn’t seem to be able to accept Natasha’s love in any real fashion: Natasha has by now had other children, but Arizona always leaves before she has any chance to interact with them.

Arizona and Montana’s mother was Sean’s first wife, and the only one who left him instead of the other way around. From the one flashback involving her, its pretty clear she’s the only one who realized the kind of person Sean was, and got as far away from him as quickly as she could. In retrospect, her biggest mistake was not taking her daughters with her. They have spent their entire lives in their father’s orbit, and can’t even be bothered to be nice to the women when he decides to leave them. When Tess, the most recent wife asks if they saw it coming, they tell her they pretty much damaged. It is a testament to how damaged Arizona is that later in the novel she comes to visit Tess, and genuinely seems surprised that she isn’t happy to see her at all.

The story is told entirely from the perspective of Arizona, and how she is trying her hardest to adapt since Montana went off to college. At the start of the novel, that means she has become ‘best friends’ with Karissa, an actress-model who the reader can instantly tell is the worst kind of person for any teenage girl to be around. She talks in the kind of deep sounding college speak that older get past quickly but Arizona thinks is deep.  They constantly go drinking together, doing drugs, and dying their hair.  Arizona worships Karissa, which is why she’s appalled when early in the novel, Sean tells him that he wants to marry her – and worse, Karissa, immediately accepts the proposal.

It becomes very clear that so much of Arizona’s emotions from this point on are purely territorial. She could deal with her father’s next hopeless marriage (you get the feeling she was just waiting for the next one to come around) and she would be fine if Karissa were getting engaged to a man, even if it was someone much older. She evens admit as much: “I want them both: Karissa and my father. Just not together.” Indeed, while Montana is understandably outraged at everything that Sean is doing, Arizona is pissed because her father is marrying Karissa – and she wants Karissa as her friend, but not her most recent stepmother.  She spends most of the novel trying to do everything they did before, getting drunk together, partying wildly, even staying out all night together.  It is not until Karissa makes a reveal that finally tells her that there has never been a single true thing about her that she gets to the point where she actually hates her – and in a funny way, makes her perfect for Sean.

To be clear, Sean doesn’t think for a moment anything he is doing is wrong or even takes his daughter feelings into account one bit. He has long since passed the ability to feel anything real for anyone, probably not even for himself, certainly not his daughter. When Arizona tells him the secret that Karissa has been keep, he momentarily acts protective of her, but the conversation that follows barely meets the standard of typical human interaction. Given the scope of the secret, you get the feeling he'd be angrier if she had lied about her natural hair color. He tries to say something comforting that he says her mother told her, but can’t even remember the words. And even though the secret that Karissa told calls everything we know about her into question, he marries her a few days later anyway. (Arizona wonders if he said the vows with his fingers crossed.)

What Arizona doesn’t seem to realize is that she, in too many ways, is like her father.  She spends much of the novel changing her appearance, dying her hair, drawing on herself, getting pierced, eventually getting tattooed. She views every relationship she has as how it affects her: she can’t comprehend why Montana might have come away from college so drastically changed. And her relationship with Bernardo has the appearance of teenage love, because he gets her, but the relationship is superficial, and in so many ways Bernardo is exactly like her father: emotionally needy, going through relationships as if they are the be-all and end-all, never listening to anyone (including his parents) unless they agree with him. Indeed, it says a lot for how badly messed up Arizona is that Bernardo has everything she wants from life: parents who have been married for years and still love each other, siblings who support each other and who love Bernardo, stability in every way that she doesn’t have it – and the fact that Bernardo considers this suffocating and not restrictive. Even when Bernardo makes a decision that is so purely that of a teenage boy, that when they deny they go out of their way to list just how much they’ve supported him. Bernardo keeps talking about his last girlfriend and how she broke his heart; you find yourself wondering if he’s like Sean in that sense and that this is his own particular cycle.

Have I told you too much? I’ve certainly told you far much more about the story of Making Pretty than I usually do when it comes to these columns.  And perhaps I have told you more than you want to know. But I think in the case of this book, you may need to know less about the plot then how the story is told. Because in this book’s case, how much you end up enjoying may entirely depend on your interpretation of what unfolds. Is this the tragedy of a family so messed up that there may be no hope for Arizona and Montana by the end? Or is it a very dark comedy about a privileged family who is going through the latest in a series of unfortunate events that will no doubt be repeated again, no doubt with an even younger model? To quote Michael Palin: “Perhaps both. Maybe neither.”

But the fact is, there is a chance that Arizona has learned something from all of this. She is, after all, a teenager and everything that happens when you’re a teenager seems life-altering and apocalyptic under the best of circumstances. In the last pages, she looks at an insight her sister has said that she might be a sage or it might just sound insightful because of how drunk they are. The last pages show she is beginning to see that there are things about everyone in her life that are toxic but there are also things she wants to be part of who she is anyway. In a symbolic gesture, she begins to remove some of the alterations she’s done over the summer and decides that even the most permanent one doesn’t have to mean what it did when she made it. Maybe she’ll leave New York and never come back. Maybe she’ll come back at the end of the summer. Maybe her mother will have the answers. Maybe she won’t. Maybe she’ll get back together with Bernardo. Maybe she won’t. The fact that all of these things and none of them are possible  shows the possibility for change that her father is long past showing.

As for that quote. I’m pretty sure Arizona and Montana would agree with it. It’s the start of a poem the reader should be able to find pretty quickly online, and that the message in the last two lines is certainly one that they are trying to do in regard with Sean, and probably one that may be the best thing considering everything they’ve already lived through.

 

 

 

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